treenotation.org VS queryjevko.js

> concatenating them changes the label for [b] from "a" to "z\na", and perhaps more damningly, erases the whitespace before "z". But, since none of the alternative formats (except ndjson and I guess plain uninterpreted binary, ASCII, or Unicode) is closed under concatenation, maybe that's less important.

Yes, being closed under concatenation is a feature I was aiming for and it indeed does bring with it this issue.

Just something to have in mind when devising formats. A simple solution here is to disallow having anything other than whitespace in the suffix of a Jevko with > 0 children. Then, if a format converts these labels to keys in a map, trimming leading and trailing whitespace, there is no problem. This is how I did it here:

https://github.com/jevko/easyjevko.js

> I don't know if you saw the last time this topic came up I linked to https://ogdl.org/, which seems pretty close to a minimal rose-tree notation.

Yes, I've seen OGDL before. It's pretty nice. A similar one is https://treenotation.org/

I have experimented with indentation-based syntaxes myself, before settling on brackets.

I have found them to be problematic, at least because:

* For complex structures they become less compact.

* A grammar that correctly captures significant indentation can't really be written in pure BNF. The way OGDL does it is this:

  [12] space(n) ::= char_space*n ; where n is the equivalent number of spaces (can be 0)

This reminds me a bit of Breck Yunits' Tree Notation (https://treenotation.org/). Both seem to have a ~totalizing energy. Maybe some common cause. :)

Hi, I'm a programmer and I've used quite a few different languages in my career. I've never studied compilers or language design, however it has always interested me from afar. Also I've always had a strong preference for simple syntax, what sane person wouldn't? Anyway I've scanned over the https://treenotation.org/ site. I get the general gist, that this provides a tool to easily create languages that use tree notation. Unfortunately I still don't really understand how to use it. If there was tutorial that held your hand that would be really useful. I suspect there a large number of people like myself that would benefit from this. Perhaps at some point I'll role up my sleeves and do it myself, but I'm sure someone else could do a better job.

> The way to fix this trend would be to reimagine the presentation layer of the browser as something other than a stack of hacks over hypertext, but so far nobody seems to have a good solution.

About a decade ago I had the start of a Eureka moment on how to do this (back then — https://medium.com/space-net/spacenet-51aca95d49a2, nowadays https://treenotation.org/). It seems to me we've missed a sort of fundamental universal notation of the universe, which you can think of as "two-dimensional binary". I predict we will soon see a Cambrian Explosion of new formats and notations that are simpler and more interoperable with each other, and some will have the opportunity to build new great languages for rendering stacks.

Awesome app. Do you plan on using it for anything in particular? Or are you just creating it as a passion project. It's totally cool.

Learning about https://treenotation.org/ (linking this for other people, not for you, Breck :P), and I like what I see. My first impression was "Lisp, but with python indenting"

> We no longer need to store our data in error prone CSV, XML, or JSON. Tree Notation gives us a simpler, more powerful encoding for data with lots of new advanced features

This is the one thing I didn't understand! Tree notation seems equivalent to these. Like at a certain level, it's all just data. Now, the major benefit is that you're supposed to think differently about what you're doing when using tree notation. Would love to hear your opinion about this conjecture.

Lots of code examples here: https://jtree.treenotation.org/designer/

And the source for that homepage is here: https://github.com/treenotation/treenotation.org

Always open to PR!

The grammar of S-exps on the other hand, I won't quote here, but I assure you it's much more complicated. How much depends on your flavor (Jevko is also simpler in this regard: there is only one flavor, clearly specified).

There is no (intended) ambiguity around whitespace in Jevko: whitespace does not occur explicitly in the grammar. Whitespace characters are just characters. This is the defining feature of the syntax.

For this reason Jevko is more low-level: if you want to treat whitespace in some special way, you have to do that yourself. Although for most use-cases this is very similar and simple, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33334314

But the point is that you can also leave it as-is, e.g.: https://github.com/jevko/queryjevko.js

or do something else -- it's up to your format.

Thank you. :)

> I wonder if I should use it for something...

I'd be honored!

A couple of ideas:

How about a simple configuration format? https://gist.github.com/djedr/681e0199859874b3324eaa84192c42... (I should make a library out of this)

Or you can put it in your query strings to make them more humane: https://github.com/jevko/queryjevko.js

Or make up a markup DSL: https://github.com/jevko/markup-experiments#asttohtmltable

Or serialize game objects in your indie game. Or make it the interface of your experimental app. Or use it to shave off a few unnecessary characters off your data: https://jevko.github.io/compactness.html

No parser in your favorite language? A basic one should be only a couple dozen lines!